


They Keep Walking

by OldSchoolJohto



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Meditation, POV Third Person, POV Third Person Plural, Stream of Consciousness, Wilderness Survival, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 12:28:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16241633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldSchoolJohto/pseuds/OldSchoolJohto
Summary: Imagine all the miles, seen as a thread winding from hip socket to knee ligament to big toe bone into uprooted grass clod: the places where the miles begin to wear and add weight...A meditation on a trainer's life.





	They Keep Walking

Imagine all the miles, seen as a thread winding from hip socket to knee ligament to big toe bone into uprooted grass clod: the places where the miles begin to wear and add weight. Miles felt in each joint, rolling over again and again on a thin sleeping mat. Miles still aching the morning after. Miles of sunrises and stars. Miles of rain. Miles of panic, searching for a road long washed away (or that never existed at all). So many green hours. So many silences. Forgetting sometimes how to speak to other humans.

 

They are ragged, bruised, bug-bitten, blistered, bandaged, and sore. They keep walking.

 

It costs them everything.

 

It gives them freedom: freedom to go anywhere they have the guts to go, freedom from expectations, freedom from social media and billboards and ads and headlines.

 

But freedom can be as tricky to grasp as fire: they learn that their pokemon serve to protect them from other trainers as much as from wild pokemon or the elements. They remember reading Lord of the Flies in high school, remembering wondering how it was supposed to be relevant to their lives. Now sometimes, in knowing, they sleep less at night.

 

They get lonely sometimes. They keep walking.

 

They wear: muddy boots, sweaty bandannas, holes in the knees (off-brand and second-hand), stains, dirt under the fingernails. Dirt everywhere. They wear the same shirt every single day for fifteen days straight. They wear a backpack that was new and top-of-the-line when the bought it, but now it’s faded and one strap is held together by duct tape. They wear everything they own.

 

The weight of their packs waxes and wanes: at first they might pick up trinkets here and there (key chains, gym leader bobble heads, miniatures of towers and bridges), either to send home or to hold in a fist later and squeeze and squeeze to know that what they remembered was real. But they learn that souvenirs aren’t worth the weight or the money.

 

Instead, they begin to write. With no cell phone service, no TV, no radio, and their one book already reread and reread, they write. Postcards home, scraps they imagine will inform future memoirs about past glory, nonsense poems folded until they can’t fold smaller and forgotten in a pocket, terse field notes, messages carved in tree bark for other travelers to find. They write in tents, praying for rain to stop, smudging the ink with sweaty palms. They write bumping along on the back of a lairon. They write in the shade of trees, in the air-conditioned pokemon hospital waiting room (smelling of cleaning solvent and hair) late at night when they can’t sleep. They start letters for their family but forget to send them. They write things they can barely decipher in the morning. It’s another way to measure distance.

 

Eventually, they either return home or they stop wondering if what they’re doing is right or enough. They watch the sun rise and set. They listen to birdsong. They clean their cookware. They watch a herd of wild stantler from a tree. They sleep. They dream.

 

They keep walking.

 

 

 


End file.
